Dec. 4, 2007 issue

I came here in the fall of 2000, straight from graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. A couple of things stood out right away — a great working atmosphere in the English department and diverse, motivated students. Seven years later, those early impressions have held true, and they're still my favorite things about teaching at EMU.

A lot of the students at Eastern are the first generation in their family to go to college, and I find that makes them particularly wonderful to work with and teach. The fact that they are so busy and have such complex lives outside of school doesn't hold them back; it pushes them to work harder. I coordinate the graduate and undergraduate literature programs and I see students who are overextended and exhausted more than any other students I've ever met. But, they take their educations incredibly seriously and work incredibly hard.

As a professor with two young children, I understand how hard it can be juggling competing responsibilities.  It's wonderful to teach students who feel so strongly that school is important. These students are a huge reason I've stayed here.

My colleagues in the department also were a big part of the draw. There's a real sense, not just of community, but of mutual support. The English department, in particular, is a very big department. We're bigger than the College of Business and, yet, people in general are interested in collaborating, and the department's extremely supportive of curricular innovation. It would be hard not to like working in a place where people really want to see each other succeed.

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